How will Twitter grow up?

This article was taken from the December issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter - the small crew that three years ago launched the world's fastest-growing communications medium - announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else's informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for "retweet", and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn't invent retweeting, it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company's second-in-command, Biz Stone, called the changes "a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be". The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site's architecture. The bad news was that "project retweet" didn't make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.

It didn't take long for Twitter users to respond: how dare Twitter mess with... Twitter! A self-described "social, search, and viral-marketing scientist" named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to "completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets". That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag - another grass-roots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations - called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter's uncompromising brevity: "Very bad plan we hates it."

The "retweet incident" is a distillation of how Twitter has come so far so fast - and how tricky it might be to keep up the momentum. In an amazingly short time, the messaging service - which does little more than circulate bursts of text limited to 140 characters to a list of people who have chosen to receive them - has established itself as a staple of social networking, commerce, electioneering, celebrity culture, public relations, media and political protest. According to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009, and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first internet service to sign up a billion users.

There's a big difference between one million adherents - roughly the number of people who receive tweets from Twitter's CEO, Evan Williams, whose recent messages reported the birth of his first child - and one billion, which puts you up there with Google and football. Can something as elementary as Twitter become an enduring pillar of the internet?

Perhaps, but Williams and Stone are going about it in an unusual way. They're not obsessed by how to fend off Facebook and Google - which are madly integrating Twitter into their own business plans even as they take steps to neutralise or maybe buy it. And they don't seem to be worried about money. The company's revenue will be a modest $4 million or so this year. Even so, they reportedly turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook last November, and seem perfectly happy to burn through its roughly $150 million in investor funds.

Instead, Williams and Stone spend lots of time concocting schemes to boost the happiness quotient of a workforce that's still only in the double figures - stuff like free lunches and inspirational visits by politicians, folk singers and cult directors. The idea is to establish a corporate culture that will abide even when the number of employees explodes. "I feel like we're one per cent into this," Stone says. "We don't want to be that child actor who finds success early and grows up to be weird."

But Twitter is already weird: it rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was - its users defined it. It was they who made Twitter into a global organism that delivers instant opinion and eyewitness reporting on everything from presidential debates to football injuries. Though the company held a debate earlier this year called "What do we want to be when we grow up?", the mission statement is still a work in progress. "If there are three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter," Stone says, "one of them would be 'I don't know'."

As the company pursues those billion users and its own business model, however, it may need to move past a studied ignorance of what it wants to be and shape its product more aggressively. The challenge is to do that without alienating the very community that is currently fuelling the company's rocket-ship ascent.

Comments

It's fitting that as part of the twitter phenomenon, I got word through twitter from @rolandharwood that @Biz Stone (twitter), @StephenFry and @quixotic -Ried Hoffman- (Linked-In) are going to be talking about the future of twitter and other 'social media' at NESTA in a live streamed event this Thursday (19th November) at 12pm.